Originally Posted by
dead_pan
As others have noted much of Russia's kit is Soviet-era legacy stuff, especially aviation. Nothing much new here, with the exception of a handful of Su57s. Those May Day flypasts have barely changed in composition for the past 30 years.
This.
They were clever enough not to scrap all their Kit after the fall of the Iron curtain.
In Germany we had ~2500 Leopard 2 Tanks back in the day. Quite modern in the 1990's and more modern than most of what is currently to be seen on those trains with which they carry stuff towards the Ukraine. What did we do with those 2500 modern Tanks? Scrap 2000 of them. What would it cost us to set up a new Tank Army which would be able to Counter them? Billions. What do they do? Wipe the dust off. Is the kit they have top Notch? For 90% of the Stuff: no. Still, as the saying goes: quantity has a quality all of its own. The same applies to Aircraft. They have some 200 - 300 Aircraft which are Avionics wise in a modern state (by Western standards). But altogether they can still get quite a bit of Aluminum into the Air and which is not useless even by today's standards despite it's far from top notch.
If you look at the numbers of Kit they procured New since 2000, you will see it is not that much more than what you would see in UK, or Germany or France corrected by the Value of currency/wage level.
You have to compare Russian Equipment Roster to what RAF would look like if you kept Tornado, Jag and Buccanneer and justed added EF and JSF instead of replacing the old stuff.
That's basically what they are doing since beginning of the 2000's.